When we come to inquire the reason for this--in other words, why an art so useful as surgery, and one which made such requirements for knowledge, sagacity, and dexterity, whose necessity was almost continually felt, particularly during these troublous times of almost constant warfare, should be so neglected by men who could best comprehend its utility and respond to its requirements--it is difficult to find a satisfactory answer. The social condition of the times sheds some light upon the question. The nations of southern Europe were socially divided at that time into the nobility, who were nearly always at war; the clergy, who monopolized learning and filled the so-called liberal professions; and, finally, the common people, who were common prey for both the other classes, and who yet had to support both without having any privileges of their own. While the practice of medicine was a clerical right, the canon of the church prohibited physicians from drawing blood, under pain of excommunication; and hence surgery, shunned by the priests, to whom it naturally belonged in connection with the practice of medicine, fell into the hands of the ignorant and vulgar, who practiced it in a purely mechanical way, without knowledge or appreciation of its possibilities. In addition to this, there was an almost total lack of detailed and precise anatomical knowledge, and but small reason to expect that the ignorant practitioners of surgery would feel the need of such knowledge. Moreover, most of the operators were itinerants, going from city to city, stopping so long as they had cases to operate upon or until{122} some reverse forced them to depart. Most of these men limited themselves to one or two sorts of operations. Some operated for cataract, others for stone, others for hernia, nearly every one having a secret method which was transmitted to his posterity as a heritage. In the history of medicine certain family names of itinerant operators have been preserved; for example, the Branca, the Norsini, in Italy, and the Colot in France. Under such conditions there could be no such thing as the profession of the surgeon. The prejudice against dissection did not begin to abate until the thirteenth century, when a very few of the clergy dared, in a very timid manner, to perform surgical operations. Their numbers increased in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the sixteenth had become considerable. Most of the great anatomists of that period--such as Benivieni, de Carpi, Vesalius, Fallopius, and Fabricius ab Aquapendente--were great surgeons.